Stanley and the Stranger
by Cray-Z
THE STRANGER’S STORY…
There he was at the bus stop, looking like a Greek statue someone dressed at Walmart. I mean it — the kid was standing there like he’d been carved by ancient artisans and then handed a $20 gift card for clothes. Tall, slim, nineteen, built like a switchblade but with the timid posture of someone who’d never actually held one. Plain jeans, white T shirt, black motorcycle boots… the whole outfit screamed “I tried.” He held himself stiffly, elbows jutting out like he was afraid of touching the air. Out of his baseball uniform, he looked like a demigod forced to attend community college.
But the face — oh, the face. Heroic brow, stern chin, cheekbones sharp enough to slice deli meat. And those eyes. Blue enough to make bottled water jealous. I’ve seen a lot of eyes in my time, but these looked like Zeus himself had Photoshopped them.
Why was a kid like that standing at a bus stop in this part of town? I didn’t know. Didn’t care. Curiosity is for people with hobbies. I just knew I wanted him — wanted him the way a crow wants shiny objects or a raccoon wants unattended rotisserie chicken.
So I walked up behind him, cleared my throat, and said, “What’s a demi god like you doing in a place like this?”
He turned, ready to give me some wholesome baseball player answer, but I didn’t give him the chance. My fist introduced itself to the side of his face with all the subtlety of a falling refrigerator. Kid dropped instantly, like a sack of ethically questionable potatoes.
I admired my handiwork. “Huh,” I muttered. “Didn’t know I still had that kind of swing.”
He lay there unconscious, peaceful in the way only knocked out athletes and passed out toddlers can be. I unzipped his backpack and rummaged through it like a man searching for gum but finding increasingly concerning objects instead. Rope. More rope. Rope in sizes that suggested he shopped at a hardware store where the employees had learned not to ask follow up questions.
I dragged him into the alley — gently, like a sofa I didn’t want to scratch — and knelt beside him. Then I straddled his hips, not with malice, but with the resigned practicality of someone who’s done this before and wishes he hadn’t.
I pulled out my dagger — dramatic, sure, but I like to accessorize — and sliced open his jacket. Not to hurt him, just to get him out of his clothes faster than his dignity would prefer. I maneuvered his arms behind him, hands pressed together like he was praying for a better script.
Then I tied his wrists, cinching the knot with a grunt.
“There,” I said. “Nice and tidy. You look like a hostage in a discount thriller.”
I sat back, wiped my brow, and sighed. “Kid, you better be worth all this cardio.”
STANLEY’S STORY …
My name’s Stanley Warner.
I’m White, eighteen, allegedly handsome, and raised in the kind of middle class family that could afford a car but somehow decided public transportation built character. We weren’t poor — just chronically committed to the bus like it was a religion. My parents picked apartments based on two criteria: proximity to a grocery store and whether a bus practically drove through the living room.
Errands took forever. You don’t do errands on the bus; you embark on quests. And despite what people say, riding the bus isn’t some thrifty life hack. It’s a financial drain with wheels. In some cities, a family of four basically has to choose between bus passes or a second mortgage. At one point my folks were dropping nearly $800 a month just to get us all from Point A to Point B without dying.
Anyway — I’m rambling. The point is: I was standing at the bus stop, minding my own business, probably looking like the poster child for “innocent commuter,” when some random dude sprinted up, balled his fist, and turned off my consciousness like I was a lamp.
Next thing I know, I’m waking up on the sidewalk, wrists bound and tasting pennies and regret, while my attacker is elbows deep in my backpack like he’s checking it for loose change or buried treasure.
I tried to speak, but my mouth was still rebooting.
“Hey… what’re you dping??”
Yes. Dping. That’s the word my brain chose. I sounded like a toddler trying to negotiate for more applesauce.
The guy froze, looked at me, and gave the exact expression someone gives when the leftovers they were about to steal suddenly sit up and talk. He didn’t run. Didn’t apologize. Just stared at me like I’d inconvenienced him by regaining consciousness.
“What’s it look like I’m doing?” he said, annoyed — as if I’d interrupted his scheduled 3:15 mugging.
He kicked my backpack shut with the casual confidence of a man who had absolutely no intention of giving it back. Then he stepped closer, crouching just enough that I could smell the life choices radiating off him.
“You should’ve stayed asleep,” he muttered.
For a second I thought he was going to knock me out again just to prove a point. But he didn’t. He just slung my backpack over his shoulder — my backpack — and walked off like he was late for a meeting.
A bus roared past behind me, full of people who absolutely saw me on the ground and collectively decided it was none of their business. The guy turned the corner, disappeared, and that was that.
I sat there, dizzy, bleeding, and wondering how a normal afternoon had turned into a deleted scene from a crime drama.
And why, out of everyone at that bus stop, he’d picked me. I even asked him this.
The Stranger wasn’t answering any questions — he just crouched and launched himself at me like a linebacker who’d been fired for enthusiasm issues. One second I was upright, the next I was kissing the pavement with him sprawled across me like a weighted blanket nobody asked for.
Then he slid up my body — not gracefully, more like a determined raccoon climbing a trash can — and his hands clamped around my throat. Not sloppy, not wild. Focused. He wasn’t just choking me; he was hunting for some specific spot like my neck had a secret "off" switch.
I tried to yell, but he squeezed harder, and my voice came out sounding like a dying accordion. I clawed at his arms, kicked, twisted — all the classic “please don’t kill me” moves — but he held on with the stubbornness of someone who’d decided today was the day he’d commit to upper body strength.
I fought for what felt like forever, but then a terrible weakness washed over me. My limbs went soft, my thoughts scattered, and suddenly I understood exactly what was happening.
I was losing consciousness.
I rolled onto my back, desperate, but he stayed latched on, squeezing in that awful, precise way that made my brain feel like it was running out of whatever it needed to keep me alive. I was so certain I was being murdered. I cried — silently, embarrassingly — and my mind screamed for my dad, my sister Erin, my mom… anyone who might object to this situation.
I reached out one last time, tried to shove him off, but my arms were done. Colored spots burst across my vision like cheap fireworks. My neck throbbed. My hands dropped to my sides.
And then the blackness swallowed me whole.
When I woke up, my head felt like someone had tried to fold it in half. A BAD headache — capital letters, full drama.
I was lying on my stomach, trussed up with ropes like a discount rodeo prop. My left foot was bare. Using one of the ropes he’d been carrying, The Stranger had tied my legs up behind me, bent at an angle no chiropractor would approve of. The other rope hauled my arms up in a matching pose, like I was a marionette abandoned mid performance.
He checked the knots, tugged them tight, and gagged me with my own right sock — which felt rude on a spiritual level. Then he pulled off my remaining sneaker and sock, apparently committed to the theme of “maximum inconvenience.”
I groaned into the gag, furious, terrified, and honestly offended by the sheer creativity of the whole situation.
I passed out again just as I felt his warm wet tongue stroke my bare sole.
The second I sort of came to my senses he immediately began running his fingers along my soles while apparently inhaling the smell of my feet. As the fog in my head began to dissipate, I started to squirm more and more and began mumbling through my sock gag. He responded to my garbled pleas by placing his hands under my shirt. His fingers around my defenseless ribs while I drowsily shifted my body to avoid the tickling sensations. It was maddening!
When he got bored with my ribs he began stroking my size ten soles in earnest and I started to complain in my semi-conscious state, "Stop! ... Please! ... I can't take this! Please Stop!" That's what I was trying to yell anyway. How all of this sounded through my gag, I haven't a clue. "Please!"
I burst out into a fit of laughter as he ran his fingernails all along my soles double-time.
"Stop, hahahahahaha, stop, why the hell hahahahahahaha are you doing this to me?" There was no reply, just more torture to my bare feet. The Stranger took up a tree branch, breaking off a twig and proceeding to run the prickly twig up and down my right foot as I went wild with gag-muffled laughter. Then he abruptly threw down the branch and proceeded to run all ten fingernails rapidly all along the soles of my helpless bare feet.
I screamed and flexed my soles as much as I could, but all I managed to do was encourage this insane mystery man to tickle me even harder! Eventually I blacked out, the sensations assaulting me were so intense. When I woke up again I felt something warm and wet on my feet. The Stranger eventually noticed I was conscious and stopped licking and sucking and doing whatever he'd been doing to my feet while I was out
Before I could say anything, he began to tickle my feet by gliding a stiff leaf over and between my bare toes. He stroked it between and around each toe on both feet, smiling at the sound of my gagged and tortured screams. Even with the gag, my screams were getting pretty loud though. I was hoping that someone would hear me. Well, I HALF hoped that someone would hear me. Another half of me enjoyed what was happening. The feeling of being restrained and tickled was so incredible! The Stranger used his other hand to glide his fingers over my left foot--from my delicate heel, up my smooth sole, across the ball of my foot and all around my arch … then he repeated the same process over and over again. My bound body rocked like a rocking horse and I humped the ground while he tickled me. He tickled me till I came really close to fainting yet again!
Once he was finished, I sat on the grass, putting my shoes and socks back on while The Stranger watched with a satisfied smirk. I put the socks on--socks that were damp with the mixture of my sweat and The Stranger's saliva--and wiggled my toes in them. Clearly, he’d been sucking the sweat from my socks while I was unconscious.
Then I put on my sneakers--the interiors of which may have also been licked by The Stranger, but I couldn't really tell.
The whole experience felt like someone had shaken my brain like a snow globe — nightmare flakes swirling around a weirdly peaceful dream. Time got slippery. Reality took a smoke break. I just lay there trying to remember what species I belonged to.
The Stranger crouched beside me, rolling up the ropes he’d used to tie me like a calf at a county fair branding demo. He did it neatly, almost politely, like he was cleaning up after a very questionable arts and crafts project.
Then he looked at me and said, “You okay?”
And here’s the part that should probably concern a therapist: my anger evaporated. Completely. Gone. Like someone opened a window in my skull and let it drift out into traffic.
Because he reached out… and rubbed my hair.
Not in a creepy villain way. Not in a triumphant “I own you now” way. More like someone petting a dog that got yelled at because its owner was having a bad day. Apologetic. Gentle. Weirdly comforting for a guy who had just tied me into a pretzel and knocked me into next week and did things to my feet that no girlfriend I’d ever dated had.
I was too dazed to feel humiliated. Too wrung out to feel scared. Too confused to feel anything normal. There isn’t a name for what I felt — not shock, not relief, not gratitude, not fear.
But I’ll tell you this much:
Whatever it was… it wasn’t bad.
It sat in my chest like a warm, bewildering glow — the kind you get after narrowly avoiding disaster and realizing you’re still here, still breathing, still somehow okay, even if the universe just punted you across the parking lot.
And that was the strangest part of all.